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Check Your Statements!

If your business is set up to accept credit cards through a merchant account (retail or online), be sure to review your statements closely. An industry wide increase in rates has been issued and most companies in the industry have made the increase effective to their merchant`s April 1st. Be sure to check your statements closely as there have been a lot of changes over the past year.

Things to look for:

Be sure to check the sections where the surcharges are summarized. Be very mindful of Mid and Non Qualified rates.

If anyone needs help analyzing their statements, please don`t hesitate to get in touch with me, I`ll do a comprehensive pricing analysis with no obligation. A lot of companies make their statements very difficult to read and the purpose of it is so you don`t take the time to figure out the rates/fees. I`ve seen statements where only one rate is shown on the statement, and you have to do reverse math to figure out the rest. I`ve seen too many people overpaying for their services, and I`d like to do my part to help businesses in the area that I`m very competent in.

A quick and dirty way to see what you really are paying with your current processor is to calculate the effective rate.

To do this you would take the total you paid to your processor and divide it by the amount of credit card sales volume you did for the month. For example, if you had $30,000.00 in credit card sales, and paid your processor $900.00 for that month, then your effective rate is 3%.

Too many merchants accept without question the discount rate that their processor says they receive. However, that discount rate is almost meaningless. Many other factors influence what a merchant pays, including:

Card type - a rewards card will cost more to process than a debit card

How often you batch out - you`ll get a better rate if you batch daily instead of every few days

Swiping the card through the terminal will result in a better rate compared to manually entering the transaction

Authorizing a credit card more than once will result in a higher rate being paid

This is really just the tip of the iceburg. Our company is one of the largest credit card payment processors in the U.S. I would be happy to analyze a current statement and provide recommendations.